For three girls growing up in the Fens in the tumultuous years between the First and Second World Wars, the Winter House was a special place of refuge and friendship. Winter or summer, they would meet at the old wooden house by the waterside to confide all the secrets and heartaches of childhood and adolescence. There was Robin, idealistic and clever, destined for Cambridge; Maia, the most beautiful and ambitious of the three, looking for a rich husband; and quiet Helen, living under the seemingly benevolent tyranny of her widower father, the local vicar.